Sun stricken :: 11:19 PM :: easyjetsetter

Hexagon It had looked promising before, but generally, nothing had come of it. Pure, blue skies in the early morning are rarely, in the schizophrenic and capricious Paris springtime, a harbinger of a beautiful sunny day. Except today, when the Sun King himself appears to have blessed my trip with the wife to his home, the Chateau of Versailles.

I have been once before, but at an age where I couldn't look at a painting without being zapped into a sonambulant stupor, and where I was more concerned with imagining myself a princess in a big skirt sweeping through the halls of this royal castle than David and Le Brun.

One of the points of contention between Leslie and I the other evening was my tendency to be snooty about Paris tourists. Whenever Leslie went to take a picture of something I was rolling my eyes, and whenever she would suggest something touristy to do I would do the "Pfft" noise with the shrug.

So today, once we passed the peripherique in the RER, I took out a surprise from my bag: a UNC baseball cap and my camera. I was going to play at being a tourist for the day, just to make her happy. Also, I had broken my sunglasses and needed the cap to stop me squinting in the sun and worsening my already crappy vision. But Shhhh, don't tell Leslie - she thinks it was a gesture of solidarity. So with my diesel sneakers, khaki capris, white t-shirt, denim jacket, haven't-washed-my-hair pigtails, messenger bag and my UNC baseball cap, I was the perfect American.

The queue was long, and hot. We bought our tickets, and Leslie, with her pathetically weak bladder, needed the loo again. So we left the building and paid 50p for the toilet entrance. We were then informed that we had to rejoin the long hot queue to get in. However, as I have mentioned before, all rules in France are negotiable, as long as you can give a good reason for why you can in fact do what you have just been told you cannot. So, after some discussion, we slipped in the back door.

The main apartments were crowded, noisy, and dark. The prettiest room, to my recollection, was the Hall of Mirrors, which was bloody well encased on plywood for restoration, with a description of the room written on them. Cause that was going to make up for it.

But the gardens. Oh the gardens. They were wonderful. I am not much of a plant person. Leslie is, and she and my mother have an uncanny knack of spending an entire afternoon discussing whether than green thing with yellow flowers on it is a shrub or a bush of laburnum. It's amazing how much like my father I am, and how much like my mother Leslie is.

When she graduated from college, unlike the other lazy beggars like myself who moved back in with their parents and moaned about the job market, she got herself hired at a florist and worked all the hours God gave her to buy a three bedroomed house, before she even had her first "real" job. So that's how she knows all about plants. As mentioned previously, I kill cacti.

However, I like long walks in pretty areas, and we had a picnic, and there is nothing I like more than ending the long walk with a tasty treat or two. So we sat down on a marble bench opposite the Fountain of Appollo (the one with the horses) and had peaches and baguettes and ham and soft cheese and carambars. We surprised some prepubescent Germans by asking them in German to take our photo (yes, there is photographic evidence of me in a baseball cap) and then sauntered off into the park.

After an hour or so lounging in the shade of the king's flower garden, we decided we needed to hire a rowboat. I once played Toad in a production of Toad of Toad Hall, but I always secretly wanted to be the water rat, and to get to "mess about in boats" on the river.

I got into sailing in school because we were required to do a major sport and a minor sport three afternoons a week, as well as a service, and a hobby on the other two. Kurt Hahn, who founded Outward Bound and the Duke of Edinburgh award scheme, also founded my school, and so the idea of physical education was central to our curriculum. I was rather bookish at 15, and my parents thought that a school renowned for cold showers and morning runs would toughen me up a bit.

I chose sailing as both my minor and major sport, and the special boat service as my service, thinking that sitting in a boat would be more relaxing than alipine ski patrol, being a canoe lifeguard, or being a fireman in the on-campus fire station. For my hobby, I hid in the boarding house and drank hot chocolate with Audrey, our fabulous, unintelligible matron.

I was pretty much thrown in at the deep end, as sailing on the North Sea in early autumn is not a cup of tea. We had these devon yawls with ridiculously heavy keels that basically could not capsize to sail, and they just taught us newcomers a few knots and towed us out there and left us to it.

Well, I loved it. I loved every bloody minute of it. Hanging out the boat on a fifty year old harness, standing on the bowsprit as the gib thrashed about, tying down sodden rope in a gale, the ghastly yellow oilskins and the frightful itchy sailors' pants and sweaters we had to wear. I loved my wetsuit that made me look like a pudding, and even Dr. Bell, snug in his dry suit and his powerboat, the bastard.

As part of the curriculum, we all had to spend a week as part of a crew of the school ketch, 85 feet of Ocean Spirit, which would take us around the Outer Hebrides, and where we were obliged to jump off the boat every morning before we would get any breakfast. We did a 24 hour sail to St Kilda, and the night sitting in the cockpit with the phospherescence below, and the stars above, and the clock at 11 knots, and the port and starboard lights illuminating the waves red and green every time the bow crashed onto the waves will stay with me forever.

I further indulged this love of water with my Ouward Bound choice for pre-freshman year "leadership" training course. I rafted, canoed and kayacked 310 river miles in three weeks down the Green and the Colorado rivers, alternating between plus five cataracts like Satan's Gut and Hell's Half Mile and long, flat stretches of dead calm where I felt like my arms were going to fall off with the repetitve strain of paddling. I saw a forest fire drip down the sides of the canyon. I saw a boat wrapped around a rock. I was almost electrocuted in a thunderstorm, I used a chemical toilet, I got trench foot and I was deliriously happy.

Incidentally, Outward Bound is responsible both for my horrendously ugly feet and also my freakishly strong bladder. Because it was a national park, we were only allowed to pee IN the river (yes, I know not very environmentally friendly), and if you needed to pee during the day, you had to lower yourself off the boat, pee and pull yourself back in, cause they weren't stopping. I had the upper body strength of a T-rex at the time (really tiny arms) and until week two of daily paddling I was unable to pull myself back into the boat. I just made myself stop peeing between breakfast and lunch, and lunch and dinner, to avoid the embarrassment of being pulled back into the raft by sexy patrol leader Josh. This on six quarts of water a day. I have a bladder of steel to this day.

Apart from one foray onto a sailboat on the relative, boring calm of the outer banks I have not been in any boat other than a motor powered one since. And anyone who has ever made a boat go with their own knowledge of winds and rope, or their own sheer bloodymindedness with a paddle knows this is no bloody good.

So the row boat, on the Grand Canal of little Venice in the park of the Garden of Versailles, was like heaven. I shooed Leslie into the stern, and took the role of the man for once, plying my oars up and down that lake for all I was worth, belting out American Pie (an old sailing favourite of mine) at the top of my lungs and reciting some Lewis Carroll. I made some French people smile, some giggle, and I didn't care.

Of course, after all that time in the full sun on the open water, both Leslie and I now have sunburn, and since I was wearing a t-shirt, I have a farmers' tan. Sabrina remarked: gosh, you really ARE from North Carolina. I'm no farmer, I said. I'm a sailor.